Starting from Loomis and Other Stories

Starting from Loomis

KL 9 DOI: 10.5876/9781607322542:c01 Starting from Loomis There were over 150 Japanese families living in Loomis; it was a large community for such a small town. In the schools, too, there were a lot of Japanese kids. I started school in 1928; we were living in the country, so I rode the bus the school provided. I spoke only Japanese then; what little English I knew I picked up during the few miserable months I spent in kindergarten. Reading was daunting. Father helped me every night through the first tworeaders,laboriouslysoundingoutthewordsinaheavyaccent.With the third reader he threw up his hands and told me I was on my own. I believe we Japanese children were segregated or tracked at public school. We were so happy in our school that I didn’t realize we had this odd arrangement until recently. From the fifth through eighth grades I had the same teacher and the same classmates, plus or minus a few. “Mrs. Land was promoted too,” we said of our teacher, who followed us every year. In our grade there were two classes or sections—one made up of Caucasian children of ranch owners, storekeepers, officials, and other prominent persons and a sprinkling of Japanese. I don’t know how the Japanese were chosen for that class; I suppose they were considered better students, though some of us in the other class made higher scores on tests. starting from loomis 10 Our class consisted of Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and poor white kids, some of whom came to school barefoot. It was during the Depression,thoughweJapanesealwaysworecleananddecentclothes— which meant no patches. Once after school, when I was home and had changed my clothes, I had on a pair of overalls with patches on my seat. A boy who was at our house called me “patch-ass.” I remember how hurtful and humiliating that was. I guess we were the “B” class. Mrs. Land, bless her, kept harping on our grammar and “pidgin English,” so much so that we all learned to speak correctly, at least in her presence. Some of those who were picked on a lot said Mrs. Land didn’t like Japanese. I don’t think that was the case; I thought she was a good teacher, really concerned for us. I wasn’t called on much, which was lucky because I didn’t always know the answers—I just pretended that I did. Even so, on my report card Mrs. Land wrote tersely, “he is intelligent and sensitive.” KL Most of the Japanese who lived in Loomis were farmers. A few owned their farms; they had bought them before the 1913 Alien Land Law was enacted, which forbade the ownership of land by Issei (first-generation Japanese). After 1913, some bought land in the name of their citizen children to get around this law. But most Japanese leased the farms or sharecropped. From the time I was a child, around ten or eleven, I was out in the orchard picking fruit—plums, peaches, and pears—in the summer. I remember when I first started I was paid fifty cents a day. It was kid’s pay, though I think I was doing an adult’s work. When I was paid at the end of the summer, I was called to Mr. Okusu’s office, which consisted of a simple roll-top desk with piles of papers and accounting books and a chair in the corner of the parlor. As he handed me the check he said, “You worked hard for this, now starting from loomis 11 spend it wisely,” and I said, “Hai (yes), thank you,” with, of course, a bow. I don’t remember the amount of the check, but to me it seemed a princely sum. In fact, I had never had a check in my name, much less for such an amount. KL We got along with the Caucasian kids at school and in the neighborhood as long as we remembered our place. We were the Japanese kids whose parents worked the farms, who lived in shacks, took furo (Japanese baths), and only wore zori (flip-flops) inside the house and to and from the bathhouse; we ate fish, rice, tofu, sushi, and other weird things. I had a few white friends, but we were never very close. I don’t remember ever going inside a hakujin (Caucasian) home, and I don’t...